


Brideshead Revisited Revisited

by fluorescentgrey



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Aggressive Brideshead Revisited References, Drug Use, M/M, Mental Institutions, References to Child Abuse, References to Transactional Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 03:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: “I’m Eliot, I have paranoid schizophrenia, I struggle with grandiose delusions that I’m actually, or was supposed to be, a decadent aesthete studying English Literature at Oxford in 1923.”





	Brideshead Revisited Revisited

“Will you tell us the story one more time, Eliot?” 

The tape recorder clicked and whirred. Across the table in the white room, wearing halos of sunlight through the wide bright windows, the panel of psychoanalysts attuned again like an orchestra warming up. 

“In your own time, Mr. Waugh,” said the oldest and most distinguished. 

“It’s just I — I tell it all the time,” Eliot explained, corralling his voice out of his brain and out of his mouth; he hated his old accent which always got into it when he had recently been sedated, but there wasn’t much he could do about that, “because, you know, and it’s been taped before.” 

“We listened to those tapes,” said the youngest doctor, who looked like Grace Kelly. “We’d like to hear it also from you now.” 

He swallowed. “Looking for cracks?” 

The doctors looked amongst themselves carefully. They perhaps did not understand that someone like Eliot, who had been intermittently institutionalized for — maybe — ten years (he couldn’t quite remember), was adept at interpreting these silent conferences even when bombed on chlorpromazine. He also adeptly understood that no matter what the doctors said they were indeed looking for cracks, because, as he had been told before, inconsistencies in the manifestation of the overarching “grandiose delusion” which had characterized his understanding of “reality” since its emergence from the recesses of his mind at age twelve or thirteen (he couldn’t quite remember) pointed to “treatment clues.” 

“We’d just like to hear it from you,” said Grace Kelly. 

\--

What had happened — he wasn’t quite sure how — was that his soul, animus, spark, shade, however one wanted to refer to one’s metaphysical self, had been expressed into the wrong timeline at his birth. 

Usually this was where people started to ask questions. “Timeline?” they would probe, with extreme gentleness. Eliot gathered (from hushed conversations in the rec room of just about every mental institution in the Midwest) that most people tended to say things like body, time, or world. 

“Timeline,” he clarified, “of course.” 

“Do you think there are — ”

“It’s not what I _think_. There _are_. There are infinite conceivable timelines.” 

“You mean like alternate universes?” 

“If I meant alternate universes,” Eliot said, keeping his voice even. The trick was to explain as though to a child. “I would say alternate universes.” 

Anyway, his soul had been expressed into a timeline where he lived with his “parents” on a farm outside of Petersburg, Indiana, U.S.A., on the White River, where it carved very ancient somersaulting bends into the thick loamy soil on its way to the Wabash on its way to the Ohio on its way to the Mississippi on its way to the sea. As a child he had picked soybeans and strawberries and taken care of the cows. He first became aware of his difference when he came to after the second time his father shoved him out of the hayloft. This was where the doctors’ brows tended to furrow and they started scribbling things on pads. “It wasn’t that far of a fall,” he explained, “but I hit my head.” 

“Were you concussed?” 

“I don’t know, maybe?” 

“Can you describe your physical abuse?” 

“I mean, I have before, about a million times — ”

“Were you ever hospitalized?” “Were you ever sexually abused?” “How often would you say it occurred?” 

No, no, whenever he was drunk, which was often, can’t you find all this in my files? 

So he was laying there on the floor of the barn alone. It was winter and outside it was flurrying signaling the beginning of some or another horrific squall that sometimes confined the little family to the house for days. His head was sticky and he could smell blood, and he hurt and couldn’t move, and he wondered if he was paralyzed or something, and so he just lay there slowly waiting to die. It was warm in the barn and the cows were shuffling around in their little stalls. He must have been thirteen because he was old enough to recognize the comical absurdity of the situation. He started laughing. The laughing shifted something. By the time he could get up again and limp back to the house in the whiteout snow squall he understood that the reason everything was so overwhelmingly terrible that every day seemed a kind of promethean trial was that he was never supposed to be here at all. 

\--

It was relatively easy to fake self-awareness in group therapy when nobody was staring you down and dissembling you with eyes. “I’m Eliot, I have paranoid schizophrenia, I struggle with grandiose delusions that I’m actually, or was supposed to be, a decadent aesthete studying English Literature at Oxford in 1923 — a fantasy which I invented in order to separate myself from the reality of my childhood abuse.” Then you didn’t have to say anything for the rest of the session, because you had demonstrated such honesty and self-reflection. 

Nobody else really said anything interesting. There was another person at this hospital with paranoid schizophrenia and grandiose delusions, but she thought she was Jesus Christ, which Eliot found boring and cliche. He slid down and almost out of his seat. Someone was watching him from across the circle of soft-edged plastic chairs — the new boy, who hadn’t said anything because it seemed like he couldn’t say anything. His mouth was nice, and wouldn’t close, and eventually Eliot realized that he was just in the new boy’s direct line of sight and his eyes wouldn't move. He must have been in some other hospital before, because Eliot recognized him, but couldn’t remember his name. Probably the therapy facilitator had introduced him at the beginning of the session but Eliot couldn’t have been bothered to listen. 

Everything seemed to happen over and over again, because everything was so predictable. Every therapy session was so predictable and every drug was so predictable and now even the people were so predictable because he had been cycled and circulated through every mental hospital between Rapid City and Little Rock like an old whore of pioneer days. To compound the effect he went back to the dormitory and laid in bed and read _Brideshead Revisited_ again. He had read it probably hundreds of times, because it was proof. For this reason he wasn’t supposed to have it, but all you had to do to get something you weren’t supposed to have was give a couple blowjobs. It was really easy, especially when you were really good at it. 

Somebody came and sat on the end of the bed. In case it was one of the doctors, Eliot folded the book carefully under his arm. Thinking about it being taken away his heart ratcheted up as if cranked by a wrench. But it was just the new boy, whose antipsychotic dose seemed to have dissipated enough that his eyes could unstick from their fixed position. It took him a while to process and develop words — like an image from a polaroid camera. At last he managed, “Where are we.” 

“Des Moines,” Eliot said. Then he realized he wasn’t sure. But probably for the new boy’s sake it was best to pretend to be sure. 

“Why.” 

“Why are we institutionalized?” Eliot sat up and tucked the book back under the mattress where he kept it along with all his other contraband. “I mean, I don’t know why you are.” 

“Why,” said the boy, “Des Moines.” 

“Why does anybody deserve to be in Iowa,” Eliot asked him. “I’ve done terrible things. But you probably are just unlucky.” 

\--

If everything had happened as it was supposed to, probably he would already be dead by now. This was another fucked up thing. He was twenty fucking six years old. He’d made it longer than Aubrey Beardsley. He didn’t know when he was supposed to die in the right timeline, but it definitely wasn’t supposed to be this drawn out. 

He understood that in the right timeline, he would have fallen in love with someone incredibly repressed and straight and subsequently destroyed himself by means of his own penchant for quashing his emotions with amphetamines and psychedelics, when such things were accessible. This person probably would have given him the most microscopic grains of what he wanted or needed which he would have treasured until they became pearls. This would have been enough for him. Love was for other kinds of people and it tracked that the bare measure he would get would be one-sided. In the right timeline he spiraled out in a blaze of poetry. In this one he couldn’t even write unless he dropped acid. In the right timeline sex was something furtive and precious to be conducted in the high grass or otherwise quietly in one’s beloved’s rooms above Trinity College. In this one — well. 

Loitering in the stairwell was itself grounds for reprimanding in the form of a huge fucking sedative shot. Let alone what he was there to do, which was substantially more taboo by mental institution rules. If discovered it was almost certain that his liaison would be fired. His own belongings would be searched and all the contraband confiscated and he would probably get solitary for a while. He himself kept it up because the materials he required were worth the risk. As for the liaison — Eliot could only feel a blush of smug pride that apparently he was good enough to warrant risking one’s employment. 

He had a fucked up relationship with this too. At age sixteen he had run away from home and taken a bus to Bloomington where he met up with some guy from the internet in a seedy motel room. It hadn’t been so bad, and the guy had paid for his bus fare, and thence had begun his penchant for using sex for things. He had had to figure it out quickly, because when he got back home after that his father wouldn’t let him in the house. The light spilling out from inside — the very loud sound when the shotgun action cracked shut. Not that his father would have actually used it, or so he told himself. His mother had her little hand on his father’s arm and behind them in the house the dog was barking. The doctors tended to take a particularly keen interest in all this when they could get it out of him. After that he lived for a while with a bunch of drug addicts in Terre Haute. When people died the other folks that lived there would go through their things. It was in process of this that he first found and read _Brideshead Revisited_. 

Upstairs the door to the stairwell creaked open. Eliot feigned jogging up the stairs so he might not be accused of loitering, but it was only McRae. “Good afternoon,” Eliot said. 

“You know,” said McRae, “I should tell your doctor.” 

“What?” 

“You’re comfortable enough around me to let your crazy out. That’s probably not conducive to your recovery.” 

He was holding a canvas bag over one shoulder emblazoned with the name of a bookshop in town. Through the thin fabric Eliot saw it contained the materials he had bargained for. “So I guess you want more than a blowjob,” he told McRae. 

“I want to fuck you but I don’t think we have time.” 

“Don’t oversell yourself.” McRae’s face clouded. He was pretty manipulable, and Eliot had had worse lays. “Give me the books first.” 

McRae did. The bag contained E.M. Forster’s _Maurice_ and two more novels by Evelyn Waugh: _Vile Bodies_ and _The Loved One_. “Are you related to that guy or what,” McRae asked. 

“What — Waugh? No — well, one of his characters is based on me. Or, you know, was supposed to be based on me.” 

“Right,” said McRae, “your timelines.” 

“They’re not _my_ — ” 

“Whatever.” 

They went together down the stairwell into the shadowy nook where it ended at one of the locked doors out onto the grounds. When Eliot had the choice, he didn’t really do this; it made him feel like a beetle on its back, as the Gang of Four song went. Like there was some soft part showing, struggling, kind of bicycling at thin air desperately. He hid his face in a corner of the wall, smelling the chalky old lead paint and cleaning solution. McRae’s hand sealed his mouth, though he wasn’t even making any noise, so he bit it. 

\--

New kid was out on the patio during their allotted fifteen minutes of outdoor time in the cold months, perched on a stone bench and folded in on himself. It looked and smelled like snow. Eliot asked McRae, who was supervising the scant few patients who’d ventured outdoors, and he said the kid’s name was Quentin. He went over and sat on the bench. “Quentin,” he said. 

The eyes moved and focused, like a camera lens. He was so bombed that something about the movement was almost unhuman. Carefully, like a child going through the alphabet, he pronounced the letter L. 

“You know my name.” 

He nodded minutely. The wind stirred his hair, which was lank and flat and smelled bad. 

“I figure we have to have been someplace together before this,” Eliot tried, “right? I forget where.” 

“Upstate,” Quentin managed. “New York.” 

“I’ve never been to New York,” Eliot told him. “Listen, you don’t have to — is it hard for you to speak?” 

Quentin nodded again. 

“You don’t have to. I’ll do the talking. I haven’t been to New York. But I have been in Rapid City, Omaha, Wichita — basically everywhere in the Midwest, I guess. Is it — do you just not speak? Or is it the drugs?” 

“Drugs.” 

“And — ”

“Bipolar,” Quentin said, “they say.” 

“Their favorite solution for even the gentlest manic state is enough Thorazine to knock out a horse,” Eliot said, casting his vision back toward McRae to make sure they weren’t overheard. McRae was embroiled in a heated conversation with the woman who thought she was Jesus Christ, so Eliot turned back to Quentin. “I have an idea,” he said. 

Quentin’s eyes met his and stuck. 

“How do they give it to you? Pills?” 

He nodded

“Let’s switch.” 

If he had been in a state conducive to emotional expression his eyebrow might have cocked up his forehead. Instead it wobbled kind of feebly. Eliot’s heart moved. 

“You get them from the nurses’ window right? We’ll get in line together — I’ve done it before. Mine is just risperidone so you might get twitchy but you can think pretty clearly. You just have to pretend — because otherwise they’ll up your dosage.” 

“What about you.” 

“I’ll be fine,” Eliot said. He may have even winked. “I have a high tolerance for the typical neuroleptics.” 

\--

Quentin’s pills were some fucked up shit. About twenty minutes after swallowing them the walls started to close in. Eliot understood that he had to at least pretend things were relatively normal, because otherwise the nurses would catch on, but very rapidly after the initial onset he understood less and less until really he understood nothing at all. He lay on the couch in the rec room staring out the window whilst the drug went through his mind ransacking everything in search of all the big storm doors that required locking. When it was done it wasn’t so much that he was alone with his thoughts as that he was alone with nothingness. There wasn’t even enough consciousness left to despair. 

He liked drugs, usually, but he preferred uppers and hallucinogens for this precise reason. They allowed him to see. The first time he had ever eaten psilocybin mushrooms he had felt trepanned. Reality — _real_ reality, in all its psychedelic nuances — had come pouring in through this fresh bloody hole in his skull. He had understood the movement of time. 

This was in Terre Haute. He lay on the floor shaking and hugging himself. The nicer people who were living there then came over and stroked his hair and spoke to him in soothing tones but after a while they gave up. For a few hours they traded off sitting in the door to prevent his leaving or killing himself, but then someone else came home with dope, and they abandoned the post. All this he learned later, when he came downstairs having been ravaged by that cleansing light, sweeping through his mind, burning the evil things to char, and they were sitting in the living room, surprised to see him alive. 

You couldn’t do it very often, because it was so heavy. He went down to the muddy banks of the Wabash and felt his synapses fire the last of psychedelic sight into his mind. In some other parallel world he waited at the join of the Thames and the Cherwell for his lover to come up from the boathouse. They would walk together into town careful not to touch. It was springtime (always springtime) and the trees were flowering. Against this person’s salt-and-earth sweat the floral odor was high and bracing. Due to recent events they could not be seen together in the pub they had once frequented on the Holywell Street and so they returned to his rooms, where of late he had set fresh daffodils in vases and thrown the windows wide open, but the flowers were wilting in the heat at the end of the day in a way he struggled not to interpret symbolically. This person regaled him with poetic tales of the woman he was supposed to marry and then after several brandies came up behind him and embraced him with both sweaty callused hands under his shirt, erection against the small of his back. He wasn’t yet quite drunk enough to handle this. He let his head go back onto this person’s shoulder and felt this person relax or almost collapse against him, gratefully, mouthing into the join of his neck and shoulder; he understood, had understood for a long time, that his continued allowance, his continued putting-up-with this fucking thing, which of course was doomed, that this kept them both afloat, somehow, struggling against each other in the sucking black water to keep from sinking. After the inevitable departure in a few hours’ time with the last glow of sunlight firing in the glass, the cool night breeze, the brandy obliterated, he thought perhaps he cried. Just a handful of very bitter tears. 

He was in process of this when he was wrenched back to the fake world by a policeman nudging his shoulder with a baton. “You’re alive,” the policeman said. 

All Eliot could do was nod under the weight of the crushing, crashing vertigo. 

“You take any drugs?” 

The cop was surveying the scene practicedly but not without trepidation. The kids at the house had been talking about a nonsensical paranoia apparently circulating police stations across the country that a first responder could become ill or even die simply from breathing normally at a scene where somebody had overdosed on particularly powerful opiate derivatives. 

“No,” Eliot lied, or not quite lied, because he hadn’t actually taken any drugs there on the bench. In the fake world, the river smelled bad and the light at dusk was flat, but like in the real world, he ached all over, in part with loneliness. 

“How old are you?” 

“Eighteen.” This was a lie. 

“Where are your parents?” 

“In the fifth circle of hell.” 

The cop’s trepidatious review reached and focused on Eliot. Specifically on his mouth. He got in the cruiser and they drove across the river to the edge of Taylorville where the paved road on the west side of the Wabash turned dirt. The cop got out and came around the back of the car and let Eliot into the passenger seat. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. 

Outside the sky was purple-red. The cop had lost a couple brightly colored candies in the deep dark well between the seat and the center console with the shifter and the stained, sticky cupholders. 

Afterward he was driven back to the fields by the train tracks, and from there he walked home. After a few blocks he started counting the money that was in his hand. The next day he walked up to the thrift store near the college and bought a nice tweed jacket and a silk vest printed in a navy blue paisley, which he then put on in the alley behind the store. His reflection in the side mirror on one of the delivery trucks in the lot was close. He was still too young, and had recently cut his own hair badly, and he had the wrong shoes. Nevertheless, so outfitted, he went to another drug house on the edge of town and spent the rest of the money on more mushrooms. 

Quentin’s pills were about the exact opposite experience. His mind had gone numb from being trapped so still inside his body, so he wasn't sure how long it lasted. Eventually he realized that the woman who thought she was Jesus Christ was talking to him. “Get up,” she said. “Get up, get up.” She reached for his arm, which went limply, and pulled it. The movement jostled something. As though one could get pins and needles in one’s brain when it came back online from being asleep. Something in there slammed a fist against the door. 

“What’s your intent,” said the Christ woman. “Why did you do this in the first place.” 

That’s easy, Eliot thought. But then he couldn’t remember. 

“Maybe you better go look,” she continued. She pulled his arm until he stood. Everything wobbled. The light through the high wide windows whitewashed him — suffocating in its incredible purity. 

“Julia,” said one of the nurses from the arts and crafts table, the kindness in her voice weaponized to a point, “be gentle.” 

They went together into the hall. His mind processed each discrete experience in increments so bare and so minute that living and moving and walking felt like a film being shown only by its every tenth frame. Into this disjointed unreality came a sudden shocking and strobelit commotion. People were running in the long hall echoing the slap of their rubber shoes upon the sharp white tile. Screams, alarms. Julia Christ was gone. He tried to flatten himself against the wall out of the path of the stampede but by the time he understood where he was and what was happening enough to attempt it the leader of the white-suited pack was upon him, having rushed into his arms, except he had no arms, or no arms that he could feel, and so this person tackled him to the floor. It was Quentin. 

“Listen,” he said. He was a real person. His eyes were real person eyes. All the feeling that his medication regimen customarily bottled up inside his mind had seeped into his face. It was almost too painful — too bright, too clean — to see. “We have hardly any time. It made me — it made everyone think it killed you. But I didn’t believe it. I’m here to get you out. I’m going to get — ”

The syringe met the join of his neck and shoulder with a sound like something being deflated. Curtains went over his eyes, and the nurses caught him before he keeled over, hustling his limp body off of Eliot and toward the dormitory rooms. 

Stillness returned. So did Julia Christ, who reappeared suddenly in his field of vision, looking somber and weighted with foreknowledge. “Don’t forget that,” she told him. 

\--

In Terre Haute he slept a few times with someone, an adjunct professor at the university, who started following him around and leaving things at the house. Most of the people who had lived there when he had first arrived were dead, a fate which Eliot himself had narrowly avoided owing chiefly to the fact that he didn’t like heroin. (It closed the trepanned hole into real reality, erased him, and he felt floating, but not in a good way.) He felt no attachment to Terre Haute or to the house or the people there and was starting to get spooked, so he packed up the few things he owned in a backpack and got on a Greyhound bus to Peoria, Illinois. He was homeless for a while and traveled by bus or by hitchhiking until doing that started to spook him too. In the winter he was in Chicago and the cold drove him to a shelter, where he made the mistake of telling a social worker about the situation with the wrong timeline. He was thus institutionalized for the first time. Thence had begun the chain of events that had characterized his life now for however many fucking years: diagnoses, prescriptions, hospitals, overcrowding, release, Greyhound bus, drugs, arrests, different diagnoses, different prescriptions, different hospitals… 

 --

In the morning he took his own pills again and felt almost like himself. He unearthed his copy of _Brideshead_ from under his mattress and found a blank page on which to inscribe what Quentin had said the day previous: _It made everyone think it killed you but I didn’t believe it. I’m going to get you out_. He ate breakfast, and then he went sleuthing to no avail, so he was forced to seek out McRae and deep-throat him in exchange for intelligence. Thus acquired, he went to the back dorm on the fourth floor of the east wing, where he was not technically allowed, and found Quentin in bed. 

The hospital was so direly understaffed that whoever was supposed to be overseeing these quarters must have gone to lunch. Quentin was alone in the high-ceilinged light-drenched room, asleep or not-asleep. His mind had been forcibly removed to some other place. The nurses had restrained him with shearling and leather straps at his wrists and ankles. There was a chair in the door which Eliot dragged over and the sound seemed to stir him. His eyes opened, one at a time, like a cat asleep, and followed with great effort, as through through molasses. 

“Good afternoon,” Eliot said. His voice was thick for some reason, which might have only been the earlier blowjob. “Did you get what you needed.” 

Quentin lifted his chin and then lowered it. With great effort he gestured with his nose and eyebrows toward his right hand, which he managed to slowly rotate inside the shearling strap. In the loose cup of it was a tear of a piece of red construction paper upon which he had transcribed the following in black crayon: 

_L_

_The beauty of all life_

_50 yrs_

_We had a son_

_I buried you_

Eliot looked at it for a while. He didn’t know how it made him feel. Eventually he reached for the shearling strap that held Quentin’s wrist down and tried to undo it desperately for a while until he almost started crying. 

“I think maybe, well, this is one timeline,”he said around the hot tarry thing in his throat, “and you, you were supposed to be in another, and mine, you know, the one I’m supposed to be in is a third. So I’m not — your Eliot, per se. I’m some other one.” 

He understood what had to happen here. It was probably going to hurt terribly but it was necessary. 

“Some other way worse one,” he went on. “Want to hear a story?” 

Quentin’s brow twitched inward. He opened the cup of his hand further. Eliot might have said _invitingly_ but the gesture seemed less optional than such a word suggested. He put his hand in Quentin’s, gingerly, kind of lightly, so that Quentin might let go easily if he wanted, which he probably would want to post-haste. His hand was warm and his fingers fluttered around Eliot’s like struggling moths. 

“My ‘parents,’” Eliot began, air-quoting the word with his free hand, “kicked me out when I was sixteen. At which point I had understood for many years that things — that I was wrong. In the wrong time. The problem was I didn’t really know where was the right time. And when I figured it out — well, it didn’t exactly feel good. To know where you’re supposed to be, and never be able to touch it. Maybe you — maybe you get it?” 

Quentin’s grip tightened. He was trying extremely terribly hard, Eliot could see it in his eyes, to say something, but he couldn’t. In the silence the fans overhead whirred, circling dust. Outside on the lawn somebody screamed. 

“I thought,” Eliot went on, “what’s the point of being alive. Maybe you get this too. Even if things were right, I would have drank myself to death. Probably quicker than I’ve managed to in this… purgatorial mirrorworld. Being alive in the Midwest is, you know, I must’ve done something, something so terrible, that any other terrible thing I do in this life is just icing.” 

“Your,” Quentin managed, “soul.” 

“It’s like a rotten banana.” 

“No.” 

“Don’t try to speak. Listen, I’ve been in a lot of hospitals. There was the one where I was fucking my doctor and three of the nurses and as such basically had unfettered control of the ward, but that was when I was on… I wish I could remember what drugs. Mostly they’re not so fun. It’s an un-place, a not-place. Like purgatory — obviously, if, big if, the concept of a three-pronged afterlife to divide souls up by subjective purity wasn’t innately a product of white heteropatriarchal interpretation of the teachings of Christ. I was raised Catholic, can you tell? My soul, Q, is like — some kind of Dorian Gray portrait thing. I know it. Don’t try to speak — I’m trying to tell you a story.” 

It took him a long time to tell it, because he kept talking around it. He told Quentin about Broken Bow, Nebraska. He had gone out there shortly after being released from the hospital in Omaha, because he had received a letter inviting him out from a person he had met years previous in Peoria. He had been abstractly in love with this person, who was straight and did a lot of PCP. He had done a tour in Iraq and had never probed his very deep trauma. Eliot had taken the bus out there thinking about probing it and else besides. Watching such a vision develop in the flat fields. The chlorpromazine slowly filtering out of him like basically everything but gold out of a gold pan just by virtue of the sun. He felt uniquely crowned and couldn’t wait to get where he was going mostly just so he could ask this guy, who he knew would know the answer, where he might buy some mushrooms. Except when he got there, this guy wasn't there anymore, and some other people were, but. He had never even told this to a doctor. It had frightened him, retrospectively, the things he had done to survive, especially considering he had never held his own life in very high esteem on this timeline or any other. Afterward, months but also years, eons later, when it was all over, when he was completely ransacked, razed, ravaged, scraped, he did something he had never done before. He willingly, of his own volition, crawled bloody across the colorless winter grassland to the hospital from whence he had come in Omaha and checked himself back in. 

Quentin watched him while he spoke. Just being looked at like this felt like maybe what it was supposed to feel like in church. Like being washed down by a kind of weaponized supercharged ray of unimaginably perfect forgiveness. Inside of which anything he said would be targeted and incinerated in a sharp white flash, as though it had never existed. When Eliot had finished speaking he noticed that outside in the yard now somebody was crying. A fly bumped uselessly against the closed, barred window. The color and the light blurred, smears of impressionist blue and green on white. 

Eliot hung his head to hide the tears. Noticed something. “Why are you still holding my hand?” 

Quentin just looked at him. For a second Eliot thought of the line from the Ginsburg poem and thought about finding the nearest nurse to demand instantaneous lobotomy. Just to not ever have to feel this — the feeling of Quentin looking at him — which was like the weight and the burning lidless gaze of nine billion suns. Such desperate and yearning and wholly unwarranted affection instilled in him a state almost beyond terror. He thought of Broken Bow again. Running in the white fields. Dusk. Diesel roar. Running. His own bloody bare footprints. The tangled ropey rises of last year’s frozen crop amidst the grayish rags of snow. Looking for something he had buried, which he had to get, before they got it, before they got him: fifty tabs of lab quality blotter acid and his copy of _Howard’s End,_ tucked together in a foil-wrapped shoebox. That had just been terror, and then it wasn’t anything — just some no-name animal feeling he couldn’t exactly remember now. He thought he would’ve taken that over this. 

“If you had any,” Eliot managed, pressing the back of his free hand against his eyes, “any of your wits about you at all, you’d let go.” 

Quentin shook his head weakly. His hair on the pillow. Eliot’s heart moved. Carefully, slowly, very gently, because there was nothing else to do, he put his head down on the bed. The sheets were cool and rough and smelled like the powerful disinfecting soap they used in the laundry room and on all cloth surfaces. A sharp clinical bite. Something deeper, warmer, sweat, sleep, which must have been Quentin’s smell. He closed his eyes. They were in the meadow together secluded in a copse of elms. Without the loneliness-pain he felt almost unlike himself. The wind stirred the leaves overhead. He breathed: the still river, the high grass, sun, soil, late spring, an herby smell, maybe thyme, spilt wine, chalk, fabrics, clean sweat in his own starched collar. Quentin’s clammy hand shifted into his hair, seeking something against the back of his skull. _Looking for the hole,_ Eliot thought, in a wave of sheer panic that threatened to dissolve this tentatively conjured reality, _looking for the scar._ Instead his hand crept upward and settled and kind of scratched. Just so and incredibly carefully above his ear and behind. There was some itch there, he didn’t know. He only really felt it when it was soothed like this. 

Couldn’t recall the last time he’d been touched this way. Precisely this. He yearned into the cool summer cloth, the other body, and turned into sugar. There was a soft candlelight… 

“Mr. Waugh!” 

He hadn’t heard the nurses running in the hallway over the sound of Quentin’s breathing and the memory of birdsong. They beset the bed, having already been deputized. As a handful descended upon Quentin to check the restraints and the size of his pupils, another cadre dragged Eliot away by his shoulders, expertly maneuvering his arms behind his back even as he reached once more, desperately, for Quentin’s hand. Stumbling over his feet, shaky, he was herded toward the door. Part of him was still inside the memory and another part of him felt Quentin’s eyes following him amid the throng. He tensed, bit his lip tightly, awaited the sedative injection. Instead his doctor, one of the hospital's head psychiatrists, was waiting for the little posse outside in the hall. “Mr. Waugh,” he said, “come with me.” 

The rest of the nurses dispersed. “Aren’t you,” said Eliot, confused, “um.” 

“Would you like me to restrain you?” 

“Um, no…” 

“Come with me.” 

Eliot followed the doctor through the bleached-smelling halls and staircases of the facility to the offices on the third floor. He had always liked the delicate gabled rooms, though they usually served as a site for trauma theater and the dispensation of renewed antipsychotic mind-erasing — the wide windows and wood paneling made him think of his quarters at Trinity College in the real world. He had already noticed and tucked away in the region of his brain reserved for conniving the fact that his doctor always seemed to be drinking. Clearly he had been pulled away from such an activity in progress, because the ice had melted in the fine deep green glass on his desk, leaving a striking beam of sunlight to refract through two fingers of watery honey-colored scotch. “Could I have a glass,” Eliot tried. 

The psychiatrist did not dignify this with a response. “Do sit down,” he said. He tossed the dregs of the drink into a dying monstera plant at his quarter. The chair in which Eliot sat, in which he sat once a week to project some fake bullshit about coming to terms with “reality,” was straight-backed and uncomfortable. Under the desk, so the doctor wouldn't see, he clasped his hands together tightly between his knees. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked. 

“Well,” Eliot lied, “thank you.” 

“You’ve been showing great progress,” the doctor said, sitting behind his desk with a practiced movement of his white coat. Only he could make this seem kind of like a threat. “I want to assure you that I’m committed to preventing any… outside influences from corrupting the great progress that you’ve achieved.” 

“Right.” 

“Which brings us to the point of Mr. Coldwater.” 

The light came in the wide window behind the doctor and blanketed his shoulders in a bright white mantle. 

“I fear,” said the doctor, “that you figure in his delusional landscape. Substantially. And I can’t help but wonder if perhaps you might’ve — ”

“You think I said something?” 

The doctor smiled in his gentle, noncommittal way. 

“When would I have said something? He just got here.” 

“You were together in an institution — ” The doctor filtered through some papers on his desk. “Brakebills Residential Psychiatric Treatment Center in Haines Falls, New York.” 

A chill filtered up Eliot’s spine. “I’ve never been to New York.” 

The doctor studied him. Slowly, as though Eliot couldn’t see, he reached for a pen and notepad. “Do you ever find yourself missing time?” 

“What? No!” 

“You said — November 21 of last year,” the doctor went on, reading from one of the papers on his desk. “You told me you didn’t remember being committed to this institution because you had taken LSD.” 

“A couple hours here and there — because of drugs. Not a whole hospital stay. Did you call them to double check?” 

“They sent me your file,” said the doctor. 

“Well can I — ”

“Of course you can’t see it, Mr. Waugh!” 

He was nearly shouting. His voice echoed in the room. Eliot sat back against the uncomfortable chair, trying to keep the upward twist out of the corner of his mouth. He figured he wouldn’t be a good mental patient if it didn’t bring him a perverse joy to frustrate the handlers. 

“A situation like this is rare,” the doctor continued, “but not unheard of.” He was carefully wiping the fingerprints from his glasses with the hem of his white coat. “Shared psychosis — otherwise known as _folie a deux._ ” 

“But we don’t have the same — ” So help him, he air-quoted, “psychosis.” 

“Maybe not exactly the same,” said the doctor, “but your delusions are aligned and mutually reinforcing.” 

Eliot realized slowly that they would likely be separated. The thing which wrapped its ice fist around his guts and grist and bones and twisted was familiar only from the memory world. He steeled his face against reacting but couldn’t help his jaw tightening, and with dread he watched the doctor notice it. But: 

“Research on the nature of shared psychotic disorder is rather limited,” the doctor said. He seemed to be asking permission. This was a language Eliot spoke adeptly. “Hardly anyone has published on it since Lasegue and Falret.” 

\--

Logically he knew what love felt like. Logically, but perhaps also metaphysically, from the memory world. And he understood from the actual life he had lived on earth in this body what it felt like to be loved, which was mostly this messy guilt thing, sometimes. Other times it was hard to feel guilty at all, because it was kind of a trial to even fuck these people and they did give him nice things. Other times it frightened him. More than once he had waited in the alley out back of the transit center in the dark for the first 5am bus, rousing with every sound. 

Quentin loved him. This certainty did not come without that old messy guilt. They played cards together in the rec room, not unevenly matched now that Eliot’s doctor had adjusted his medication. Between each move the sun shifted another six inches or so over the floor and up over Quentin’s freckly arms onto the table and then onto his chest and face and hair and then over him and left them both in shadow again. Only when the light was gone did Eliot remember how to feel about it, considering he had felt that way before/otherwise, in the rooms above Trinity College, in the spring, or maybe somewhere else, also imaginable as at the tip of his tongue, like a familiar song on the breeze… that feeling not necessarily measurable in words now, though he tried sometimes, at the edge of sleep, with the dose going out, to string the thoughts together like a necklace of plastic beads. 

At the arts and crafts table he watched Quentin drawing the same thing over and over again for hours and then for weeks. He gave the pages to Eliot and they were confiscated by the doctors, presumably for study and inclusion in the inevitable academic paper. No two were exactly alike, and each had measured variances, but each sheet displayed pointillist blocks of color in a twenty-by-twenty square. Some developed into landscapes and others into pleasing geometric patterns when you held them at arm’s length, like a painting by Seurat, and others were little more than abstract nonsense, or otherwise some inner expression of Quentin’s mind which from the outside could be neither interpreted nor quantified. 

He liked them but couldn’t think about them much. Couldn’t think about anything much. And anyway, rather quickly after they were received, they were gone, because the doctor kept them in his office in a manila folder and asked Eliot’s opinion on their meaning only occasionally. 

\--

Once, he was holding one of Quentin’s drawings, but it was in some different place. It was nearing the end of the day, purple-dark, crickets and frogs in the deep wet woods, but there was a light on in the cabin. He knew inside it would be warm but outside it had been raining. Bone-deep spring chill. A mosquito alit on his wrist and he smacked it dead, smearing blood. “Where's the green go,” Quentin said. He was knelt in something like one of those Zen sandboxes, except it was spread with jewel-tone tiles. 

Eliot studied the map he held. “Four down, six in. Two in a row — and that’s the last of it.” 

He folded the map and stuck it in his pocket. Quentin put the last two tiles in and then he leant back against his wrists and waited. When nothing happened he got up and brushed dirt off the seat of his pants and then he went in the cabin and slammed the door. 

Eliot counted to ten and then he followed. “You’ve got to stop expecting anything to happen,” he said. 

“Then why do we even keep fucking doing anything?” 

“I don’t know. Isn’t that the nature of a quest?” He laughed but kind of swallowed it because he knew Quentin didn’t find this sort of thing funny. Quentin sometimes didn’t find anything funny. “Have you read, like, even a single old medieval romance — ”

“Oh my god.” 

“They’re actually good! Maybe it would give you, like, some context.” He sat on the bed. Quentin turned out of the little kitchen and watched him. At first it had been weird that there was only one bed, and then it wasn’t weird for a while, and now it was weird again, because certain lines had only recently begun to be crossed, and only occasionally, and never discussed. “I don't know if we could get any of them here,” he said. 

“They probably have their own unique storytelling tradition here,” said Quentin in all seriousness. 

“I’m surprised you don’t know everything about that already.” 

“There was some reflection on Fillorian written and oral history in one of the Extended Universe books,” Quentin said, tucking his hair behind his ear, “but, you know, it's not necessarily canon, is it…” 

Eliot threw himself back on the bed so he wouldn’t say what he was tempted to say whenever Quentin took it upon himself to expostulate on nerdy bullshit, which was, please let me suck you off. The rain came again, and he heard it in the thatch and pitch on the roof, whispering, closed his eyes. 

“I've been thinking,” Quentin said, “maybe there's another reason why we're here.” 

_Duh_ , Eliot also didn't say. 

“How could you possibly ever capture the beauty of all life in ten square feet.”

The bed dipped. When Eliot opened his eyes Quentin was sitting on it, pretty close, closer than until recently had been customary. The rivets of his spine pressing against the thin fabric of his shirt. 

“You don’t have to die here with me,” Eliot told him. “If you want to go back and get Alice or Julia…” 

“Would that… work?” 

“I don't know,” Eliot said, suddenly terrified. “I didn't mean it.” 

It was raining harder now. The fire guttering in the little grate. Eliot closed his eyes, and eventually he felt the bed dip again. “Good,” Quentin said, closer now. His hair had come loose from behind his ears and whispered against Eliot’s face at the corner of his eye. 

\--

It wasn't quite a dream. 

\--

He woke up because he couldn’t breathe. It was dark in the dormitory, stars in the smudgy window, and there was a hand over his mouth. 

“You’re the most beautiful person ever to live,” Quentin said. So he was off his meds. 

“No,” Eliot managed, muted a little bit, by Quentin’s hand, “you.” 

Quentin lifted his hand. “What?” 

“I said no, you.” 

Across the room someone snored. Eliot sat up, folding his knees. Quentin looked at his eyes, then his mouth, then away across the floor. 

“You want a blowjob,” Eliot said, not really _not_ meaning it, necessarily, but more for the response he suspected it would invoke, which was, “No — um — well — not right now — ” And the bright red flush high in his cheeks, and at the tips of his ears. “I just figured,” Quentin said, “maybe.” 

He was looking at the door. “Oh,” said Eliot. 

“But maybe you — ”

“No. I don’t want to stay. Did you think I wanted to stay?” 

“Not really. But. You know.” 

Sometimes it’s easier, of course, being the unsaid. 

Eliot got up before he could think too hard about it. Put his robe on over his pajamas and got the copy of _Brideshead_ out from under the bed. “You don’t need to take that with you,” Quentin said, standing. 

“Why not?” 

“You don’t need it. Where we’re going.” 

“Where are we — ”

He turned heel and went for the door. Eliot followed him, though he took the opportunity of the turned back to put the book in the pocket of his robe. Quentin had pressed his ear to the door so Eliot did too. Beyond was silence, though when they eased the door open they saw it was because the night guard was sleeping in her chair. They went down together to the doctors' offices on the second floor, where the windows might be opened. The doors were locked but Quentin coaxed one open with a bobby pin. 

“How’d you learn to do that?” 

He cocked an eyebrow. “Foster care.” 

“Foster — ”

“It’s hard when you can, like, remember doing magic, in — real life, you know. But you have to learn to do things the… stupid way.” 

They stepped together into the teak-paneled office and Quentin shut the door again. The moonlight was coming through the window beyond the winter-bare oak tree scraping the pane of glass with a suffering ghostly sound. “Did you say magic,” Eliot said. 

“You don’t remember that?” 

“Uh — ” 

“It makes sense,” Quentin said solemnly, “that it would do that to you.” 

The window was heavy and both of them not far from atrophied, necessitating they haul it up together. The wind was cold and cut like a very sharp knife through the thin fabric of Eliot’s clothing but if it bothered Quentin you couldn’t see it on his face, which brightened around the eyes and the sharp nose in the moonlight. They helped each other up onto the narrow sill. It wasn’t a far fall, and the thick branches helped them down. As soon as his feet hit the ground Eliot ran. Just out of some primal shock, like a racing dog let out of the gate, running after the rabbit on the track. Quentin was beside him and then stopped him with an arm thrown across his chest. They turned together, gasping breath, more adrenaline than exhaustion, back toward the hospital. 

“Where do we go now?” Eliot asked him. 

In the darkness the building reared up — like a rogue wave with doomed boats in it. The hulking black facade just a shade mishued by the deep bloody violet night behind, studded with white clinical light. Before them the lawn, and then the nothingness at the ridge of trees. 

“I don’t know,” said Quentin. “I’ve never done this before.” 

No city lights, no nothing. No stars, black fields. Beyond the fields the plains. Above them the clouds moved quickly. The air was brisk and bright and smelled like snow. 

“You’re coming,” Quentin asked him, “right?” 

“Of course. But — ”

“You’re not afraid. Right?” 

Something cold, colder even than the night, swept up his spine. “What would I be afraid of?” 

Quentin seemed to retreat into himself. But there was no answer there. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see.” 

They went down the hill together, _contra mundum_ , toward the darkness.

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> i almost didn't finish this because the finale was so terrible, but here we are. 
> 
> nota bene: i am extremely neurotypical and have never been institutionalized. i'm aware that a lot of this is likely factually incorrect - the story is a bit of a fantasy, but if i've done anything wrong, do let me know and i promise to be receptive.


End file.
